There were minor minor hiccups over the weekend, mostly due to a concentrated bunch of noisy workunits being pushed through the pipeline. Other than that - no big server issues to mention.

Some people discovered a single BOINC client creating new, redundant hosts at the rate of one every few seconds. In the grand scheme of things this is no big deal. Bob usually checks for such things every so often and removes the zombie hosts to keep our hosts database as trim as possible. This case was slightly unusual due to the creation rate. I contacted the participant in question and we confirmed an old client on a system running Vista was to blame.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

When I think about zombie computers, I think about botnets (for example, the botnet that the Storm worm built, whose sheer number of zombies is enough to spook even Bruce Schneier), DDoS attacks, open proxies, and spam.

By the way, I remember one piece of malware that installed SETI@home (back before BOINC was even around) on many people's computers without permission to boost his or her stats. The same thing happened with Folding@home. I don't know what happened with the SETI@home cheater, but the Folding@home cheater got his credits zeroed out.

When I think about zombie computers, I think about botnets (for example, the botnet that the Storm worm built, whose sheer number of zombies is enough to spook even Bruce Schneier), DDoS attacks, open proxies, and spam.

By the way, I remember one piece of malware that installed SETI@home (back before BOINC was even around) on many people's computers without permission to boost his or her stats. The same thing happened with Folding@home. I don't know what happened with the SETI@home cheater, but the Folding@home cheater got his credits zeroed out.

We have had a similar experience here and all projects except one cooperated very nicely when it was pointed out to them and deleted the account of the offending user and zeroed the stats.BOINC WIKI